Elizabeth
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From England, Elizabeth encouraged Henri to go to war against Guise, yet without being prepared to do much to aid him, and by the end of the year, Henri had almost lost control. Protestant supporters of Henri of Navarre arrived on 18 September, adding a further insurrectionary element to the stand-off between king and subject. By May 1588, Paris was in the control of the Guise, whose ally, Philip of Spain, was pushing for a complete rupture with the crown. Guise was delighted to work with him to bring down Elizabeth but balked at the possibility of setting up a Spanish client monarchy in France. Guise and Henri III were therefore forced into uneasy collaboration, convening in October at Blois. Guise now found himself, embarrassingly, at the head of what amounted to a proto-democratic party. In November, deputies of the Third Estate threatened to leave if the king refused to lower taxation, arguing that “the Queen of England, wicked though she is, is not maintained by these means.”5 The English Parliament, they argued, was able to pass resolutions without interference from the royal council. Thus, the ultra-Catholic Guise found himself the spokesman of what was, in effect, an attempt at a constitutional revolution based on the model of his great enemy.
Henri was equally disgusted, and his solution was the murder of Guise. He was assassinated (after a sensible breakfast of Provençal prunes) in the king’s antechamber early on a December morning by the king’s bodyguard. The murder of Guise did not preserve the ailing house of Valois. A month later, the Sorbonne lodged a decree in the French Parliament which deposed Henri III and replaced him with a council. Desperately, the king turned to Henri of Navarre, and the two mounted a campaign against the Leaguers over the summer, but on 1 August, Henri III was murdered by a zealous Dominican monk.
At this point, Henri of Navarre sought assistance from England. His correspondence with Elizabeth proceeded in the conventional language of courtly love, with one of Europe’s most famous philanderers professing to be ravished by the portrait of the fifty-six-year-old queen. Elizabeth was not impressed by Henri’s subsequent gift of an elephant, neither an aesthetically pleasing nor economical choice, but she permitted him to go through the motions of a “courtship” while remaining aware that she had little choice but to assist him. With the Leaguers proclaiming their own candidate, Charles, Cardinal of Bourbon, she faced the possibility of a Spanish-ruled puppet state across the Channel, or at best the emergence of two confessionally divided states, Catholic north and Bourbon south. Twenty thousand pounds and four thousand troops were promised to Henri in September, prompting Cecil to remark on the vagaries of political fortune: “The state of the world is marvellously changed when we true Englishmen have cause for our own quietness to wish good success to a French King and a King of Scots.”6
France was the first site of Essex’s ambitions. Like Leicester before him, Essex’s ideas of his own military prowess were based more on his lineage and his ability to make an impressive appearance in the tiltyard than on actual soldiering experience. The evidence of the field showed him up as little more than a flouncing amateur. In 1591, Elizabeth sent a small expedition under Sir John Norreys to Brittany, where it met with some success. Essex was given the generalship of the French forces the same year, but his campaigning consisted primarily of dubbing an inordinate number of knights (twenty-four, more than Elizabeth herself had made in a decade) and hanging around waiting for Henri IV, who, despite having given Essex a private interview, without the outraged Elizabeth’s permission, never actually showed up in the field. Trudging round in the mud of northern France was not Essex’s idea of military glory, however much it may have been a realistic experience of actual warfare. Having obtained a seat on the Privy Council in February 1593, the earl set about sowing discord among Elizabeth’s advisers, with the aim of displacing Robert Cecil from what appeared to many as his natural inheritance, now that his father was evidently in declining health. The exposure of poor Rodrigo Lopez was claimed as a victory, but Essex had little understanding of, or interest in, the daily grind of political business at which the Cecils, father and son, so thoroughly excelled. He wanted power, and action, and flash, without having to bore himself too much with the somewhat middle-class business of detail.
The struggle for dominance in France continued for four years, which proved an intolerable strain on Elizabeth’s resources. So when Henri made his peace with Rome on 22 July 1593, at an elaborate ceremony at the royal abbey of St. Denis, her feelings were ambivalent. She described Henri as “the most ungrateful King that liveth” but was encouraged by his promise to continue religious toleration for Protestants.7 In a move which gave the lie to the idea that conservative opinion still rejected the concept of female rule, Philip of Spain was pushing for his daughter, the Infanta Isabella, to succeed instead of Henri. It was Isabella’s foreignness, rather than her sex, to which the French Estates objected in their rejection of the scheme. For her part, Elizabeth did consent in 1594 to support an expedition to oust the Spanish from Brest, though for the next two years she refused any further support for Henri, despite considerable pressure from the more militant among her council.
ELIZABETH’S CHOICE TO make her translation of Boethius’s The Consolation of Philosophy is notable at this juncture. She began the work, her first major translation since her gifts to her father and Katherine Parr as a princess, at Windsor, shortly after hearing the news of Henri’s conversion. Despite the French king’s compliments on her portrait, Elizabeth knew that, visually, the game was up. She has been criticized for her failure during the 1590s to reposition her symbolic image—“the aged actress looked foolish as she continued to play the part which had once made her famous”—yet the translation may be seen as precisely such a gesture, a reclaiming of intellectual authority.8 Elizabeth’s looks may have been waning; not so her mind. Boethius was a sharp choice, and one which, as we have seen above in her exchange with Ralegh, played to her own self-conception as a divinely appointed monarch. It was also a subtle response to a literary challenge. In 1593, another lady had been at work on a translation. Mary Herbert (née Sidney), Robert Dudley’s niece, had attended on Elizabeth before her marriage to the Earl of Pembroke in 1577. As sister to the courtierpoet Philip Sidney, Mary created an intellectual circle around her home at Wilton which has been described in the most glowing terms of Renaissance comparison as “the English Urbino.” After her brother’s death in the Netherlands, Mary, whose own excellent education had included Hebrew, continued his translation of the Psalms, eventually publishing them in 1599. The Sidneys were allied with the militant party at court, and the Psalms were particularly important to radical Protestants—the Huguenots sang Psalm 68 as a battle hymn. Mary was keen to present her late brother as a Protestant martyr, and her dedication of the work, to both the queen and Philip himself, can be read as a challenge. The expenses of the French campaigns amounted to over £300,000 by the time of Henri’s “apostasy,” and though Parliament wished to reduce subsidies by two-thirds, and Elizabeth had been forced to sell off crown lands to raise funds, many considered that she had not gone far enough in her support for the Huguenots. In counter-translating Boethius, Elizabeth was asserting the authority of her judgment.
Above all, Boethius counselled patience. By implication, Protestant zealotry is to be mistrusted:
Each thing seeks out his own proper course
And do rejoice at return their own
No order given to any remains
Unless he joins to end his first
And so steadies his holy round.
It is by acceptance of God’s (and therefore Elizabeth’s) will that things will return to their true nature; it is presumptuous to seek to illuminate the holy mind. Thus, Elizabeth subtly reminded her reader of the spiritual pride of the Protestants who advocated further armed conflict, and of her own unique status as a channel of communication with God. Contending with the changes in her council, the pressure from militant Protestants, and the frustration of Henri’s conversion, Elizabeth looked for succor in Boethius’s injunction to seek
the truth by rising above the pettiness of worldly matters:
Man alone his head upward bends
On high thy mind should raise, lest overweighed
Thy body made aloft, thy mind should
Lower sit.
This rendering reads as a recollection of Sidney’s observation in the Defense of Poesie, then in circulation, that “our erected wit maketh us to know what perfection is, and yet our infected will keepeth us from reaching unto it.” In other words, Mary and her fellow advocates of intervention would do well to remember the thoughts of their pet martyr, that it is the mind which raises us to the quality of divine grace, and excessive dependence on action reduces us to mere bodies.
Just as Henri had employed the vocabulary of courtly love in seeking Elizabeth’s favor, so, more broadly, did Protestant intellectuals in seeking to associate her with the cause of transnational Protestantism. Literature, often in Latin, formed an important connection between Elizabeth’s court and the Protestant centers of northern Europe, another strand of connection between Elizabethan England and the continental Renaissance. Paulus Melissus was another member of the Sidney circle, a German writer and refugee who had known Philip Sidney in Heidelberg in 1573. He arrived at court in 1585, soon after which he dedicated his first poetry collection, Schediasmata poetica, to the queen. His ambition of an official appointment remained unfulfilled, but his work expresses all the hopes of European Protestants that they would find a champion in her, casting himself as the supplicant lover in the mingling of the erotic with the divine which Elizabeth had so successfully arrogated to herself. Elizabeth functions as both lord and lady, sexually idealized as “Rosina” (one can see why the well-read queen balked at giving poor, earnest Melissus a job) and as an armed princeps ignotus, his weapons burnished by heavenly light. True piety, he argued, will only be achieved by a prince worthy of God’s love, couched in the most yearning of courtly terms:
For twenty Mays I have been able to creep through acanthus and often been subjected to pricking thorns and brambles
There the Queen was permitted to gather a gleaming flower which Venus is always accustomed to love above all others
But spring has never had any regard for me and summer glances back towards my face… . No rose is to be seen… . When will that cup of the rose reach out to me?
Melissus articulated the despair of Protestants who saw Elizabeth as the object of longstanding and fruitless devotion, but Elizabeth had as much regard for the German as spring did, and by the early 1590s, Melissus’s “ideal prince” had mutated into Henri of Navarre.
Henri’s conversion was thus, in a sense, a bitter vindication of Elizabeth’s policies, which she expressed in her own translation, that interfering in the workings of the sacred mind was a vanity, a spiritual puffery which would be thwarted by fortune. Patience was also considerably cheaper.
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IN SEPTEMBER 1598, Elizabeth lost the last of the three men of her life, her brother-suitor-enemy Philip of Spain. For all the vagaries of their relationship, his portrait was still kept in the royal bedroom, which was also the site of Elizabeth’s final stand-off with Essex, who had left for Ireland several months previously. English authority there, never particularly strong, had received a serious blow in the defection in 1595 of Hugh O’Neill, Earl of Tyrone. Although plagued by almost incessant rebellion, English subjugation of Ireland had proceeded throughout the previous five years until some form of consistent English government had been established all over the country, with the exception of Ulster. Tyrone had been an effective instrument in this, but now he demanded that he should be given Ulster to govern in Elizabeth’s name. When he was refused, he rebelled. In the summer of 1598, O’Neill was besieging the English castle of Blackwater in the north, overpowering the English Army sent to relieve it at a cost of two thousand lives. With Cecil gone and Ireland in need of a commander, Essex saw an opportunity and returned to court. When Elizabeth refused to see him, he feigned illness, at which the queen relented, sending her own doctors to tend him and allowing herself to be persuaded, against her better judgment, that the earl should have the command in the next Irish campaign. Essex realized too late that he was a victim of his own arrogance, admitting that the role was “the hardest task that ever gentleman was sent about,” but unable to back down. Elizabeth, whose own view of Ireland as an albatross on England’s neck was summed up in her remark, “The like burden and charge is not found in any place in Christendom,” hoped that for once, Essex’s bragging might turn to the good, and was prepared to equip him far more thoroughly than she had been Leicester in the Netherlands fourteen years earlier.
Elizabeth later remarked angrily that she had paid Essex £1,000 per day to strut about the countryside. The purpose of the 1,400 horse, 16,000 foot (with quarterly reinforcements of 2,000), and £23,000 worth of materiel was the immediate subjugation of Tyrone. Essex had vaunted his view that anything “that was done in other kind in Ireland was but waste and consumption.”1 Yet after a summer of what Elizabeth scornfully referred to as a “progress,” he had not only failed to engage Tyrone but complained loudly that he received nothing from England except discomfort and wounds to his soul. Essex was disobedient, promoting his crony the Earl of Southampton to General of the Horse, a position Elizabeth had forbidden as Southampton was in disgrace over his entanglement with Elizabeth Vernon, whom he had married after a spell in the Fleet Prison. Essex also continued his scatter-gun dubbings, not having learned from Elizabeth’s disapproval of the number of knights he had made in France. The queen was altogether disgusted, particularly as, rather than admit his faults, Essex whined and wheedled and blamed others. Essex returned to Dublin for three weeks in the middle of the summer, then set off again on campaign, but still he failed to do anything definitive about Tyrone. In August, Elizabeth wrote sardonically that,
if sickness in the army be the reason, why was not the action undertaken when the army was in better state. If winter’s approach, why were the summer months of July and August lost? … surely we must conclude that none of the four quarters of the year will be in season for you … for you had your asking, you had your choice of times, you had power and authority more ample than any ever had.2
Finally, on 5 September, Tyrone himself took the initiative and organized a private conference with the earl on the banks of the River Lagan, where a truce was settled. Essex did not see fit to inform Elizabeth of the terms he had negotiated, throwing the council into a panic. He had been specifically instructed not to return without formal permission, yet now he considered that his only course was to explain his conduct in person.
The eglantine, the delicate rose so often associated with Elizabeth, and which she had taken as her badge from her grandmother Elizabeth of York, flowers in late spring and early summer. To Elizabeth, who was well accustomed to discovering the messages of imprese, the verbal/visual conceits displayed at the tilt and in miniature paintings, one of Essex’s gifts might now have attained a sorry irony. One of the best-known paintings of the period, Nicholas Hilliard’s Young Man Amongst Roses, is widely considered to be a portrait of Essex. The earliest dating for the picture is 1585, so if it is indeed Essex, he would have been about nineteen, which fits well with the beardless face, the moustache barely discernible, the elegantly posed youth depicted. Dressed in Elizabeth’s colors, the black and white she had worn so long ago to indicate her commitment to virginity, the boy stands with his hand to his heart, the first time such a gesture is deployed in English painting and reminiscent, in its exaggerated suppleness of line, of the Mannerist stucco works at Fontainebleau which influenced Hilliard’s style at this point in his career. The portrait may be read as an impresa expressing love for a woman (the queen), but possibly also of friendship with a man, a suggestion reinforced by the powerfully upsurging trees in the background. This would fit appropriately with the mingling of genders often applied to Elizabeth as master/mistress, and the composition also recalls Elizabeth’s figuring in this fa
shion as the source of erotic authority in Paulus Melissus’s rendering of his entrapment in the tangled rose fronds in his contemporaneous poem. The motto, Dat poenas laudata fides (My praised faith is my pain), is from Lucan’s De bello civili, which Elizabeth would have recognized as associating the young man with Pompey, the great Roman general who by the age of twenty-five had already been granted two triumphs. The size of the picture, slightly too large to be worn as a miniature, reinforces the hand-on-heart gesture, its “status as a precious object to be held and admired in the palm of the hand deepens its iconographic focus upon physically touching the heart.”3 If the picture was made as a gift to the queen, its resonance had altered considerably between its production and the autumn of 1599. That Elizabeth held Essex’s faith in her hand, that his heart was hers, twined perennially in her motto, was an elegant conceit, but now the roses were browned and faded, and the career of the ambitious young general proved to be as deceptive as the carefully laid-on colors of his lover’s complexion.
Essex left Dublin on 24 September and made straight for the court at Nonsuch, which he reached at about ten o’clock in the morning on the 28th. Of a previous absence from court he had written to her,
The delights of this place cannot make me unmindful of one in whose sweet company I have joyed as much as the happiest man doth in his highest contentment; and if my horse could run as fast as my thoughts do fly, I would as often make mine eyes rich in the beholding the treasure of my love as my desires do triumph when I seem to myself in a strong imagination to conquer your resisting will.4
Now Essex’s image would be put to the test. For both players in the charming game of love which had sustained the relationship between the young aristocrat and his queen, it was a cruel encounter with reality. The swooning lover crashed into Elizabeth’s chamber in his filthy travelling clothes, “so full of dirt and mire that his very face was full of it,” to confront his fair mistress, barely out of bed, her wrinkles brutally exposed in the morning light and her wig off. Elizabeth kept her countenance and played for time, uncertain as yet whether his precipitate arrival was yet more recklessness, or if it heralded the beginning of a coup d’état. Once she was assured that Essex had arrived with only a small party of servants, she dismissed him to bathe and dress and received him again to dine. By the afternoon, now dressed and made up, Elizabeth was ready to attack. She demanded that he account for his disgraceful conduct, and after two sessions of interrogation by council, Essex was instructed to keep to his rooms. Effectively, he was under arrest, confirmed three days later when Elizabeth commanded that he should be confined at the residence of Lord Keeper Egerton, York House, where he remained until the following March, when he was permitted to return to Essex House, though still under arrest. On 6 June, the earl was called before a committee of judge and councilors, and knelt bare-headed as he was censured for contempt and insubordination. He was deprived of all his offices excepting Master of the Horse and warned that he had narrowly escaped perpetual imprisonment in the Tower and extensive fines. In August, Essex was once again a free man, only to be rendered ever more desperate by Elizabeth’s decision that the tax monopoly he had been granted on the import of sweet wine should revert to the crown now that the ten-year lease was up. Furious, humiliated, and in terrifying debt, Essex took himself off to stew in the country.